CHAUTAUQUA - Reforming the educational system is not only a United States problem, Jeff Beard told the Chautauqua Institution crowd Thursday.
Beard, the director general of the International Baccalaureate in Geneva, Switzerland, has had many experiences with international educators.
"I have had the opportunity to visit with educators from around the world," he said.
The education crisis is not limited to only the United States, he said. Many countries around the world are in the midst of the same crisis our country is experiencing.
"It is easy to think that this is a U.S. problem, but it's not," he said. "It's international. There are countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia which are currently experiencing the same problems. There are also countries that do it well."
The failure to stay competitive in the international playing field is a direct result of our failure to stay competitive in the education field, he said.
"We make a poor use of our talents," he said. "Our education system dislocates people from their talents."
Beard spoke about the evolutionary change of the education system, but said that rather we need a revolutionary change.
"I think that we need to think about ways that we can innovate more fundamentally," he said. "We are sort of bound in this box of thinking that certain things just have to occur because they have always occurred that way."
Somehow we as a society have to find a way to change the paradigm of the current system, he said.
In order to do this, he said, we need to train more effective teachers.
"The key thing that makes this different is the teaching," he said.
We need to train and hire the best teachers, and support those teachers with funding and resources in order to effectively teach our children, he said.
Beard spoke about the South Korean school system, and how a large portion of teachers are screened before they ever even get to the university. This way, the pool of teachers is whittled down to only the best, he said.
"We need to start all the way back and make it more selective," he said.
We also lack the systematic method of properly evaluating teachers, he said. He compared this with golf. Anyone can play the game, but only those with natural talent can achieve the best of their ability.
"Our educational model is one of the 20th century, if not the 19th century," he said. "It is based upon an industrial model. We need to teach students how to think."
In order to survive in today's economy, with students changing careers seven to 10 times within their lives, Beard believes that education should support entrepreneurial and creative thinking.
"Every day, everywhere our children are spreading their dreams under our feet, and we should tread lightly," he said.
Beard has served as president and member of the West Des Moines, Iowa school board for five years, and currently serves on the board of Life's Building Blocks, a small start-up that "helps parents teach children how to make good life decisions" using interactive products that promote adult/child interaction.